Tuesday, October 6, 2009

MacArthur Park

When I was a kid I thoughtthat the greatest record ever madewas the 1968 mod orchestral rendering ofof Jimmy Webb’s lost love opus, MacArthur Park.For me, MacArthur Park was a flash of wisdom, an epiphany as greatas an apostle’s brief glimpse of Heaven,and an experience so innately sensual as to make Fanny Hillseem like a Lyndon Johnson state of the union address by comparison.As sung by that great drunken actor, Richard Harris(who, if they’d had videos in those days, would have crooned the wordswhile decked out in love beads, mirrored sunglasses, and a paisley Nehru jacket),MacArthur Park was Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,and Dr. Suess’s Green Eggs and Hamall boiled down to five bittersweet minutesin the American summer of love.I’d always stop what I was doing to reflect,to meditate like a pilgrim at the end of that long, tortuous journeythrough the slough of despond whenever it came on the radio.I could almost feel Casey Kasem fighting back the tearsevery time he sent it out as a long distance dedication.I could almost see the women in their yellow satin dressesswoon as the song, after traveling through the airwaves,came out of the radio like a succubus wearing Old Spice cologne.

For me MacArthur Park was no one-hit wonder or one-night stand,no temporary truce or let the sun shine in fly-by-night Broadway craze.For me MacArthur Park was the fall of Hanoi, an ether binge,an up-against-the-wall motherfucker are you part of the solution or are you part of the problemEvel Knevel motorcycle leap into the great beyond.And, like all great works of art, MacArthur Park raised some serious questions.For example, who was the miscreant who left that cake out in the rain?And what exactly was that recipe that he’d never have again?Yea, these metaphors were deep, giving me forlorn visionsof that “sweet green icing falling down” in the dark,of drinking “the wine while it is warm” with no oneever catching me “looking at the sun.”These words and images moved meand I was sure they would move others as well.I often quoted them in love lettersI wrote to my first teenage crush,believing they would reveal me to be a profoundly sensitiveyoung man whose passions she would be foolish to deny.It was no wonder she sent the lettersback to me:I was young, in love, and as powerlessas a corpse at a funeral.

This, of course, was some years before The Silver Convention’sseminal Fly Robin Fly rid me of my more sentimental proclivities.Before I sat back in cataleptic paralysis like one of Marcus Welby’s patientsas a friend of mine from high school began singing“They’re coming to America” along with Neil Diamondwhen that hideous song came on the radio.Before I cringed in late night horror film terror while another friendbegan chanting, “We got a great big convoy, running through the night,we got a great big convoy, ain’t she a beautiful sight?”as we headed east on Route 50 toward the beach in the dead of winter.

It was about this time when I began havingmy doubts about the afterlife.When I stopped believing in ESP, astral projection, pyramid power,speed reading, streaking, and the amazing Kreskin.When I stopped believing that the police were on my side.When I stopped believing that the concept of America included mewhether I was rich or poor,white or something else.When I stopped having faith in God and the entire world.

It was all so long ago.

I was dressed in the blue wool suit I’d grown into since high school,a stiff white shirt that reeked of too much starch, a red silk tieI’d borrowed from my father, and the blackleather shoes my brother had bought me for the occasion.It was 1994. It was cloudy and cold with gray sunlight flowing throughthe stained glass windows as a priest gave me instructionson how to read a passage from the Bible.It was the same priest who had mumbled his way throughthe rosary the night before like a drunken Elvis impersonatorgoing through the motions of putting on a show.The priest who would later put words into my dead mother’s mouth–a priest who had never met her, who had never knownof her existence until she was gone–saying from the top of the pulpit with his head held highin self righteousness how if she were here with us todayshe’d be asking us to take the time to considerand reflect upon our lives as Christians.

Holy Christ, I thought, she’d never ask us to do that:Because if she were alive and at a funeral she would haveshown some genuine respect for the dead.And though I’d always shouted out from among the crowd at the foolson stage, demanding from them some measure of truth,I sat there in silence loosening my tie as he delivered a sermon, which,like a stupid song from the summer of love that no longer moved me,had nothing to do with either life or death.

-Jose Padua

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------From around 1998.

NYDC BLUES: How I Tried To Escape The Sick World Of Poetry (1995)

New York: it was where I did my first poetry slam. It was where I began to get my work published regularly. It was where I first appeared on national television. It was where I fell truly in love for the first time. It was where for the first time in my life I felt I was in a city where I belonged. It was also where, after having cast off the last vestiges of my youthful insanity, I vowed to give up poetry completely.

About Me

José Padua’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bomb, Salon.com, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Unbearables, Crimes of the Beats, Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, and many other journals and anthologies. He has also written features and reviews for NYPress, Washington City Paper, the Brooklyn Rail and the New York Times. He has read his work at the Lollapalooza Festival, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Black Cat Club, the Public Theater, the Washington Project for the Arts, and many other venues.